The Conflict: Israel-Gaza
★★★★☆
Battle Lines: Israel-Gaza
★★★★☆
War requires experts. Every fresh conflict reveals a cruel and complicated history of political and religious hatred. Military technology turns out to be a subject of endlessly unguessable complexity (who would have imagined how much analysis of Russian tank tracks we would all read in 2022?). In such circumstances generalists flounder. On Israel and Gaza, some of the wider news podcasts — more comfortable covering who is up and down in Westminster — have struggled. Over the past couple of weeks I have listened to a great many vague and sorrowing platitudes about the human cost of war. Also (inevitably) lots about how Twitter/X has reacted to the terrible events. It’s hardly Marie Colvin-level stuff.
Epoch-making news events emphasise the power of old-school news organisations, which deploy reporters and experts on the ground, over the whizzy new media ventures, which rely on a couple of well-remunerated talking heads.
Last year, the war in Ukraine spawned a host of excellent podcasts. Between the BBC’s Ukrainecast, The Telegraph’s Ukraine: The Latest and Goalhanger’s Battleground: Ukraine you could get up to about PhD level on subjects such as Russian nationalism, military vehicle armour and tank battle strategy. Now the conflict in Gaza has experts taking to the airwaves (do podcasts have airwaves?) again.
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I’ve been listening to a couple of great shows. The Conflict: Israel-Gaza from the BBC features an array of the corporation’s expertise: Lyse Doucet, its chief international correspondent; Jeremy Bowen, its international editor; and Jo Floto, its Middle East bureau chief.
Doucet’s on-the-ground knowledge distinguishes the show. She has an eye for striking details. She says that many ordinary Palestinians carry around the rusted keys to the homes they lived in before they were expelled in 1948. She recalls the years of optimism when she dined in West Bank restaurants with Hebrew and Arabic menus, and when Yasser Arafat suggested that the Gaza Strip could become the next Singapore. There’s an incredibly moving discussion of one of the BBC’s Palestinian reporters’ struggle to keep his family safe in the Gaza bombardment. It all adds to a compelling feeling of being in touch with the intangible sense of the situation, which can’t be achieved from inside a studio. When Doucet recalls how she and Floto instantly agreed that “this feels different”, it’s not a platitude but a gripping summary of the atmosphere on the ground.
• Times correspondents answer your questions on the Israel-Hamas war
From the Daily Telegraph comes Battle Lines: Israel-Gaza, a last-minute adaptation, we’re told, of a plan to release a more general podcast on global security, defence and geopolitics. Presented by David Knowles, the first episode features Nataliya Vasilyeva and the defence editor Danielle Sheridan reporting from Israel. Vasilyeva has visited a devastated kibbutz where the “suffocating” smell of decomposing bodies “hangs in the air”. She reminds us that some Israeli citizens live so close to the border that they were able to watch their Palestinian neighbours hanging their washing on the other side of the fence. Sophia Yan, the paper’s senior foreign correspondent, is interesting on how things seem from China. I had no idea that ever since Mao, the Communist Party had viewed the Palestinian struggle sympathetically, as a struggle for liberation.
Wars feel more immediate in audio reporting than they seem even on TV. There’s something compellingly intimate about the sense of being on the phone to top war reporters. And it helps that they know what they’re talking about.
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